Yom-Tov Lipman Heller: Portrait of a Seventeenth Century Rabbi

Rating:
Summary: fascinating and highly readable
Review: This is a scholarly book that can and should be appreciated by a much wider audience. Davis places his subject's gripping personal life and ideas within a clearly presented larger European, historical context as well as within the Jewish communities of Bohemia, Prague, Vienna, and Cracow. Seldom considered aspects of the early scientific revolution and the corresponding shifts in worldview, deeply personal poetry that illuminates family relationships as well as risky political allegiences, the eastward European migration of the Jewish communities that had once been centered in the Rhineland, attitudes toward philosophy and mysticism... Rabbi Lipmann Heller's life and and times are endlessly interesting.